Table Of ContentProsody in Interaction
Studies in Discourse and Grammar (SiDaG)
Studies in Discourse and Grammar is a monograph series providing a forum
for research on grammar as it emerges from and is accounted for by discourse
contexts. The assumption underlying the series is that corpora reflecting language
as it is actually used are necessary, not only for the verification of grammatical
analyses, but also for understanding how the regularities we think of as grammar
emerge from communicative needs.
Research in discourse and grammar draws upon both spoken and written
corpora, and it is typically, though not necessarily, quantitative. Monographs in
the series propose explanations for grammatical regularities in terms of recurrent
discourse patterns, which reflect communicative needs, both informational and
socio-cultural.
Editor
Sandra A. Thompson
University of California at Santa Barbara
Department of Linguistics
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
USA
Volume 23
Prosody in Interaction
Edited by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Elisabeth Reber and Margret Selting
Prosody in Interaction
Edited by
Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
University of Freiburg
Elisabeth Reber
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
Margret Selting
University of Potsdam
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prosody in interaction / edited by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Elisabeth Reber, Margret
Selting.
p. cm. (Studies in Discourse and Grammar, issn 0928-8929 ; v. 23)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Prosodic analysis (Linguistics) 2. Grammar, Comparative and general--Phonology. I.
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar, 1971- II. Reber, Elisabeth. III. Selting, Margret.
P224.P758 2010
414’.6--dc22 2010039866
isbn 978 90 272 2633 4 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8846 2 (Eb)
© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Foreword ix
Preface xi
List of contributors xix
Introduction
Prosody in interaction: State of the art 3
Margret Selting
Future prospects of research on prosody: The need for publicly available corpora:
Comments on Margret Selting “Prosody in interaction: State of the art” 41
Arnulf Deppermann
part i. Prosody and other levels of linguistic organization in interaction
The phonetic constitution of a turn-holding practice:
Rush-throughs in English talk-in-interaction 51
Gareth Walker
Rush-throughs as social action: Comments on Gareth Walker
“The phonetic constitution of a turn-holding practice:
Rush-throughs in English talk-in-interaction” 73
Susanne Günthner
Prosodic constructions in making complaints 81
Richard Ogden
The relevance of context to the performing of a complaint:
Comments on Richard Ogden “Prosodic constructions in making complaints” 105
Auli Hakulinen
Prosodic variation in responses: The case of type-conforming
responses to yes/no interrogatives 109
Geoffrey Raymond
Prosody in Interaction
Retrieving, redoing and resuscitating turns in conversation 131
John Local, Peter Auer and Paul Drew
Doing confirmation with ja/nee hoor: Sequential and prosodic
characteristics of a Dutch discourse particle 161
Harrie Mazeland and Leendert Plug
part ii. Prosodic units as a structuring device in interaction
Intonation phrases in natural conversation: A participants’ category? 191
Beatrice Szczepek Reed
Making units: Comments on Beatrice Szczepek Reed
“Intonation phrases in natural conversation: A participants’ category?” 213
Jan Anward
Speaking dramatically: The prosody of live
radio commentary of football matches 217
Friederike Kern
Commentating fictive and real sports: Comments on Friederike Kern
“Speaking dramatically: The prosody of radio live
commentary of football matches” 239
Johannes Wagner
Tonal repetition and tonal contrast in English carer-child interaction 243
Bill Wells
Repetition and contrast across action sequences: Comments on Bill Wells
“Tonal repetition and tonal contrast in English carer-child interaction” 263
Traci Walker
part iii. Prosody and other semiotic resources in interaction
Communicating emotion in doctor-patient interaction:
A multidimensional single-case analysis 269
Elisabeth Gülich and Katrin Lindemann
Table of contents
Double function of prosody: Processes of meaning-making
in narrative reconstructions of epileptic seizures:
Comments on Elisabeth Gülich and Katrin Lindemann
“Communicating emotion in doctor-patient interaction.
A multidimensional single-case analysis” 295
Elisabeth Reber
Multimodal expressivity of the Japanese response particle Huun:
Displaying involvement without topical engagement 303
Hiroko Tanaka
Response tokens – A multimodal approach: Comments on Hiroko Tanaka
“Multimodal expressivity of the Japanese response particle Huun” 333
Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
Multiple practices for constructing laughables 339
Cecilia E. Ford and Barbara A. Fox
Multimodal laughing: Comments on Cecilia Ford and Barbara Fox
“Multiple practices for constructing laughables” 369
Karin Birkner
Constructing meaning through prosody in aphasia 373
Charles Goodwin
Further perspectives on cooperative semiosis:
Comments on Charles Goodwin “Constructing meaning
through prosody in aphasia” 395
Helga Kotthoff
Author index 401
Subject index 403
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Foreword
The appearance in 1996 of Prosody in Conversation, edited by Elizabeth Couper-
Kuhlen and Margret Selting (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996), was a landmark pub-
lication, drawing together, for the first time, a group of articles that explored the study
of prosody in its ‘home environment’, everyday conversation.
The editors noted in their introduction to that volume the ways in which it repre-
sented a new development in the study of language and social organization, calling for
new methodologies, new analytic approaches, and new interdisciplinary interactions.
In retrospect, in fact, that volume can rightly be said to have heralded an entire new
subfield, with practitioners from Conversation Analysis and Linguistics focusing their
investigations on the role of prosody in social interaction.
Since that time a key figure has been providing consistently insightful leadership
in developing these new methodologies, approaches, and interdisciplinary interac-
tions, namely Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen herself. The collection of papers in this vol-
ume, Prosody in Interaction, both celebrate her scholarship and provide eloquent testi-
mony to the high standards which she has set for the entire field.
Inspired by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen’s scholarship and example, the editors of
this volume gathered the scholars represented here in Potsdam in September 2008 to
present their research findings in her honor, and to express their admiration and es-
teem for her research and their appreciation for her as a teacher, mentor, and col-
league. Those research findings, thoughtfully crafted into this volume, consider issues
of prosody in interaction from a refreshing range of perspectives, including its pho-
netic properties and its role in sequence organization, radio commentary talk, child/
caregiver talk, aphasia, and medical interviews.
These papers both show how far we’ve come and suggest countless fascinating re-
search projects designed to further discover the way prosody works in human social
encounters.
Sandra A. Thompson
Santa Barbara, California
spring 2010
References
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Selting, Margret (eds.) 1996. Prosody in conversation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
